Enough About Sochi—On to Pyeongchang

The moment the torch went out in Sochi, Pyeongchang 2018 began sucking the Winter Olympic air eastward to the Korean Peninsula.

The South Koreans have had some 200 observers in Sochi, taking notes on everything from security to transportation to the design of the venues. Their goal is to deliver their Games in an "accurate, convenient and prompt manner," in the words of Kim Jin-sun, president of the Pyeongchang organizing committee—absent the chaos and roughly $50 billion expenditure of the Sochi Games.

As the winter Olympics draw to a close in Sochi, WSJ's Dipti Kapadia ventures to the Pyeongchang 2018 house in Olympic Park to find out how construction is going and what to expect in 2018. Photo: Pyeongchang 2018

That may be easier said than done. Like Sochi, Pyeongchang is a massive project that includes a new high-speed rail line and expressway, construction of six venues and a plethora of housing. Pyeongchang also has yet to begin selling major sponsorships, an effort Kim said will start later this year.

"We expect following Sochi we will have a more favorable environment," he said. "Pyeongchang is relatively far away."

Of course, as Sochi organizers know, four years can pass quickly, especially when multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects are involved. As of now, few in the International Olympic Committee are particularly worried about Pyeongchang. The 2016 Rio Summer Games are the next crisis on the horizon.

Pyeongchang figures to be significantly different from the Sochi Games, whose ice sports took place in a vast gated park that was a 40-minute train ride from downtown Sochi. "This huge Olympic Park is a bit far from Sochi's downtown," Kim said. "We want to integrate our Games into the city and the people."

Also, Sochi isn't near a major Russian city and has just 350,000 residents—about as many as Tampa, Fla. The plan is for Pyeongchang to be just a 60-minute train ride or a 1 1/2-hour car ride from Seoul, a metropolitan area with roughly 25 million people. The Games will be within about a four-hour drive from any major city in the nation.

Finally, Pyeongchang will likely be a more accommodating host in terms of hogging medals. The Koreans specialize in speedskating, especially short-track speedskating. They won eight medals in Sochi, including three gold, but silver-medalist figure skater Yuna Kim was the only Korean to win a non-speedskating medal.

—Matthew Futterman

ENLARGE

Dutch speedskaters
Reuters

The Speedskating Rink: Where The Action Was at the Games

Sochi's Adler Arena was orange long before the Dutch arrived to sweep up two-thirds of the long-track speedskating medals. But after that performance—the most dominant by any country in any single sport in Winter Olympic history—those 8,000 orange seats felt like a tribute.

Adler Arena belongs to the Netherlands.

Not only did the skating-mad country bring its finest athletes and its party-loving fans, but it also brought its royal family. King Willem-Alexander, an amateur skater himself, wouldn't have missed this.

But as great as the Dutch fans were, the atmosphere never throbbed as much as it did when there was a Russian skating. Any Russian. The Adler fans got behind no-hopers and medal favorites with the same shameless homerism.

Meanwhile, beneath the ice, in the windowless mixed zone, a team slowly unraveled. As their performance fell to a 30-year low, U.S. skaters worked their way through a maze of reporters, answering questions about controversial skinsuits. First, the skaters hinted the suits were a problem. Then, after they switched suits and still underperformed, some said it was the idea of the suits that had troubled them. And all the while, there were those who parroted a directive from their coaches as they said it was never about the suit anyway.

All of which isn't bad for a venue that was supposed to host one the Olympics more mundane sports.

—Joshua Robinson

Hey, IOC: We Hear Oslo Is Lovely This Time of Year

IOC president Thomas Bach couldn't have been more complimentary to Sochi organizers in his final news conference. Athletes loved the Games, he said, and so did sponsors and all the other Olympic stakeholders.

That said, after tackling southern Russia, heading to Rio for 2016 and then to Pyeongchang for 2018, Bach appeared to suggest that the IOC might continue to take a breather from awarding Olympics to countries or regions that have never hosted them before. The IOC followed this route in September when it chose Tokyo to host the 2020 Summer Games. (Tokyo also hosted it in 1964.)

"It is excellent to go from time to time to new regions and new cities and give them a new opportunity to develop winter sports," he said. "There is also a time to go back to your roots."

Next year, for the 2022 Games, the IOC will choose among Almaty, Kazakhstan; Beijing; Krakow, Poland; Lviv, Ukraine; and Oslo, Norway. Krakow is bidding jointly with Slovakia, which would hold some of the snow events in Jasna in the Tatras mountains.

During the Games, every medal winner from the Netherlands was contractually required to make an appearance onstage at Heineken Holland House, a temporary nightclub away from the Olympic Park where the techno music is booming, the Heineken is flowing and every new friend you make is wearing orange from head to toe.

There, the athletes are presented with plaques and a spot on "Legendary Lane," a Hollywood-style walk of fame that records every Dutch medal. But the Heineken House is more than just a party spot. It is also a clever way for Heineken to associate its brand with the Olympics, and reach its target audience, while altogether bypassing the local organizing committee.

The Heineken Holland House started at the 1992 Barcelona Games, when the Dutch national organizing committee was looking for a partner to set up a "home away from home" for fans. What started as a small tent soon became a fixture. In Sochi, the house is a multiroom club on the grounds of a nearby hotel with a separate VIP area. During the first week, it welcomed Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The athletes aren't paid by Heineken. Hans Erik Tuijt, Heineken's global director of activation, declined to say what the financial deal was with the Dutch Olympic Committee. "But it's not cheap, I can tell you that," he said.

--J.R.

Corrections & Amplifications

Kim Jin-sun, president of the organizing committee for the 2018 Pyeongchang Olympics, conducted an interview with The Wall Street Journal for this article. An earlier version of this article erroneously attributed his comments to Moon Dong-hoo, vice president of the committee.

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